


promise of the future

by Areiton



Series: Find Me In the World [13]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Derek POV, Falling In Love, Getting Together, Healthy Relationships, M/M, Pining, Slow Burn, Well adjusted Derek Hale, Woodworking as therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-12 04:21:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13539603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Areiton/pseuds/Areiton
Summary: He always imagined that if they found each other, it would be like an earthquake.





	promise of the future

When he left Beacon Hills--and the times he let himself dream of finding Stiles--he always imagined that if they found each other, it would be like an earthquake. 

A life altering, foundation rattling  _ moment _ when everything changed, when they slammed into each other with all the force and fury they’d always had, and it rewrote the world he lived in. 

Maybe because Stiles was part of the madness of Beacon Hills and that had always been something to rewrite his world--maybe because it was  _ Stiles _ and when Derek was honest with himself--it happened more, now--Stiles has always had the uncanny ability to shake up everything Derek knew, to reshape his world around a sarcastic skinny boy who took up too much space, who meant too much, who  _ gave too much. _

So he thinks it’s fair, to expect this--this reunion that he had hoped for, dreamt of, but never believed would actually happen--to be like that, be like Beacon Hills and Stiles and earthquakes. 

It’s not though. 

He thinks, if it was, he’d run.

He’d pack up his little world and run until he was lost again, and stay that way. 

There is a part of him that will never be able to resist Stiles--the part of him that made the puzzle box, the part of him that jerks with hope every time his phone buzzes--but he is happy. 

He is  _ happy _ and his pack is safe, and that  _ matters.  _

There is too much, now, for him to lose to risk on a boy and the earthquakes that trembles his foundation. 

No matter how much he might want that. 

So it’s normal, he thinks, to be afraid. To feel that like a bruise press against his excitement, against his hope. They exist together, and when he tells Braeden, she hums consideringly and tells him that it makes sense. 

That this isn’t a bad thing. 

That he is allowed to be careful and protect himself. 

She tells him what he already knows, that Stiles would want that from him. 

He expected an earthquake, a shattering, unstoppable change. 

But Stiles drifts into his life like a breeze, a springtime wind, the quiet breath of promise for a future and the end of a long winter. 

He slips into Derek’s life with a quiet invitation and settles there with a text and stays there with emails, long and rambly and talking about his life. 

There’s something quietly reserved in the emails, in his texts, in his reticence to call Derek. Like he is as cautious and scared as Derek is, and it makes him ache. 

The boy he knew in Beacon Hills was a tsunami, a wild force of nature that could withstand anything the world threw at him. 

But not without scars, Derek learns. 

Stiles is different now. He’s quiet. He isn’t the wild storm raging--he’s a mountain carved from stone, battered and standing strong, but quiet. Remote. 

It breaks Derek’s heart, and settles him. 

Because he left Beacon Hills for a reason, as much as he longed to go back, sometimes, to find Stiles--that place, that life, that  _ Stiles _ \--didn’t fit him. 

It would never fit him. 

But he thinks, this one. The one who talks about his job at a software firm and books and weekends gardening with his Dad--he thinks this is someone who could fit into his world. 

Sometimes, Stiles will bombard him with texts, a momentary burst of manic energy, usually summoned by a new movie or enraging article, most often by a new book. 

But it was never the kind of manic desperation that marked high school and the constant almost dying. 

It was...gentle. 

They talked about life. About nothing. About everything. 

Derek told him, after over a month of texts and emails, about the years right after he left Beacon Hills. He talks about his pack of omegas and the way he fell into carpentry, how it went from something his therapist suggested to a way to meditate and grieve and remember. 

Stiles skirts his reason for leaving, and won’t talk about Scott at all--that wound is still too new, too raw. But he talks about Allison, and the nogitsune. He talks about his mom and how his dad is happy, and less lonely here, how they both feel less haunted and how it makes him feel guilty, sometimes. 

He talks about the future, like he has one. 

He talks about it like Derek will be there, to see it. 

Stiles twists himself into Derek’s life without ever seeing him, in a hundred emails and a thousand text messages, the way spring twists its way into the world with a gentle, barely felt breeze. 

Derek wakes up one day and watches a robin outside his window and thinks of Stiles and the future and it doesn’t feel like a bruise anymore. 

It only feels like a promise. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> ......  
>  yeah, it's not quite a reunion BUT IT'S CLOSE! You guys. I can TASTE it. <3
> 
> Come flail at me on [Tumblr](http://areiton.tumblr.com/)


End file.
